Member Article

Growth hacker marketing: The phrase that isn't going anywhere anytime soon!

There is one word that has dominated blogs, articles and opinion columns for the past few months now and it does not look like it is going anywhere anytime soon. Yes, you might have already guessed that word is growth hacker marketing. But what exactly is it? And what does it mean for businesses? Well, this blog will take you through the top things you need to know about growth hacker marketing and how it can be used to boost your business.

What exactly is growth hacker marketing?

Well, it is all about thinking outside the box when it comes to marketing. It is a concept that is widely related to small business start-ups and rightly so, because everything that is done by a growth hacker is to gain growth for the business. Therefore it is all about looking for different techniques and ways to accumulate traffic, convert the traffic into sales and make an impact. However, growth hacking is something that has been used, not only by smaller businesses, but also by larger corporations in order to save their marketing budget.

One of the biggest growth hacker success stories came from Hotmail. In 1996, just after launching, Hotmail decided to save their marketing budget and instead use their existing user base to carry out the marketing for them. At the end of each email their existing customers sent was a tagline that simply said ‘Get Your Free Email At Hotmail’ and that was it. The company went from around 20,000 users to 1 million within the short space of 6 months.

What techniques are used in growth hacker marketing?

There are many ways that businesses choose to implement growth hacker marketing. Many suggest starting a blog and sharing that blog within your social community, others suggest carrying out extensive social listening in order to determine where your customers are online and what they are talking about. It is all about generating traffic, creating great original content which consumers are able to engage with and starting a conversation that will create traction with audiences. Whichever techniques you choose to implement, just remember, it all boils down to knowing your customer, knowing what your customers want and knowing how to communicate to your customer.

How do you measure growth hacker marketing?

The case study shown above highlights the dramatic impact that growth hacker marketing can have on a business, if carried out successfully. The great thing about growth hacking is that the results and impact are completely measurable, this means that businesses are able to identify, extremely quickly, whether their technique is working. This also means that if results are not being achieved, changes can be made quickly and efficiently. Traffic can be easily measured using tools such as Google Analytics and effective market research can be carried out simply by undertaking social media listening to find out what consumers are really talking about.

So there you have it, everything you need to know about growth hacker marketing. It is a concept that provides an interesting contrast to investing large budgets into marketing campaigns and brings in to question the idea whether this is always necessary to create a large impact. Has this blog raised some interesting questions for you? Have you ever implemented growth hacker techniques? Or are you skeptical as to whether this concept is one that would work?

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jonny Ross .